


like burning ants

by slybrunette



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-27
Updated: 2010-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-13 10:12:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU-future fic. She sometimes forgets where she parked her car or whether or not she bought orange juice last week; under a magnifying glass everything looks that much more severe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like burning ants

_we look younger than we feel  
and older than we are  
now nobody’s funny_   
**(it never happened; the national)**

 

 

 

They meet at a bar.

Meredith has a line of empty shot glasses in front of her and an unfamiliar bartender who doesn’t understand there are times when you need to say _stop_ and doesn’t know her well enough to bother trying even if he did. There’s a purse that isn’t hers perched atop the seat to the left of her; he takes the one to the right.

“Rough day?” He asks smoothly, cockney accent heavy just like his charm.

“You’re not a doctor?” She already knows the answer to her own question because he’s asking like he doesn’t know that four attendings and countless residents, interns, and nurses took over two ORs for fourteen hours only to have the patient die on the table. And if you worked at the hospital then you’d know that, and you wouldn’t ask, you’d just buy the woman who stood on her feet for fourteen hours another drink.

“Can’t say as that I am,” he replies.

“Because you look familiar.” Her words slur a little, knee knocking against his stool as she angles her body towards his. “But you don’t work at the hospital. And I don’t get out a lot.”

He has a beer in front of him now, frothy and cold, and there are white scars all along his hands. “I have been told that I am the things dreams are made of, on occasion.”

“You think you’re charming, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” she replies, but there’s too much levity to her voice, the smile on her lips too effortless, for that to be believed.

“You’re still talking to me.”

“I’m waiting for my sister.” Her sister who’s been in the bathroom for the past ten minutes and who she’s starting to definitely think might have someone in there with her. “And then I’m leaving.”

“Okay,” is all he says.

“Okay.”

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

That’s wrong.

Really, they met at the hospital – Seattle Grace before it was Seattle Grace Mercy West and Meredith before she was anything but a green intern whose name always seemed to get said in the same breath as ‘Ellis Grey’.

“Don’t worry, darling, you’ll see me again,” he’d said, and a door had closed behind him.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

“Hey.”

Alex looks away from whatever textbook is in his lap to see her shrugging out of her jacket in the doorway to his room. He doesn’t spare her more than a singular glance and a “hey yourself. Were you at Joe’s?”

“Yeah. Joe’s minus Joe.” She kicks off her shoes, leaving them against the wall. “Someone was filling in for him.”

“And so there were tequila shots,” he fills in, hands flat on the pages in anticipation of that second where she collapses on his bed and displaces everything before she settles.

“And a guy.”

“Oh, is he coming too?”

She turns her head to look at him. “No.”

“Good,” he replies, “because you can sleep here but he can’t.”

“We wouldn’t be sleeping anyways,” her eyes find the spine of the book, most of it obscured, but there’s the word _pediatric_ and she can imagine the rest. “I thought you were into threesomes?”

“Not those kind.”

“Spoil sport,” she says, and he doesn’t argue.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Her best friend quit her job and moved across the country.

There was a note taped to her front door in the morning and a set of keys in the plant by the steps.

 _I’m sorry_ , was all it read and half a decade of friendship leaked between her fingers, ink bleeding from the rain.

 

 

 

-

 

 

She has forgotten what it’s like to sleep straight through the night.

Frequently, she blinks awake and the clock on the nightstand or Alex’s watch tells her it’s after three. Sometimes there will be a light that’s still on, forgotten, and other times her phone lies cradled in her hand or half-hidden under her pillow. Sleep feels almost accidental, as they grow up and learn to work longer hours and still squeeze in all the socializing and all the drinking that they used to do.

Every now and then, she pads down the hall and slips into her own bed, catches that remaining hour or so of shut-eye before her alarm comes to life.

This morning, the rain’s hitting the roof and the air above the blankets seems twenty degrees cooler than the air beneath them, and so she burrows deeper.

 

 

-

 

 

It’s the bar again, the next night, only without Lexie and with the Y chromosome possessing members of her little patchwork family.

She lets Alex crowd her into a booth towards the back, where Jackson already is, and does a very good impression of someone who’s relatively unaffected by the pair of eyes that locked onto her the moment that she walked in. Derek’s watching her; Derek is always watching her these days.

Jackson’s working with the new cardio head, second one since Teddy left, and Alex is still arguing with Arizona’s replacement about some twelve year old girl’s treatment plan, much in the same way he was arguing with him three years ago and will likely be three years from now, when Arizona still hasn’t come back and Alex still isn’t willing to bend. Tales of their days are peppered with complaints, while hers remain vague and patient focused. It’s still give and take, still somehow relaxing, a distraction from working, at best, twelve hour days with the man she sent packing after a few years and a post-it that promised forever.

She still watches the door. She thinks she’s being discrete about it, quick glances and lingering gazes at the bar, searching for the man with the accent and familiar face, searching her mind for a revelation that failed her last night. It’s a lot like looking at someone through a fogged up window, where all you can make out is their shape and where you think their eyes should be. It’s not the name that’s on the tip of her tongue, it’s the place. Where she’s seen him before. And if she can figure out his context then the rest is easy.

“You okay?” Jackson asks, after a while. Her eyes flick to his. “You’re kind of spacing out over there.”

“She met a guy,” Alex volunteers, tipping his near-empty bottle back. If she hits him now, a hand against his shoulder or an elbow to his ribs, he might choke. And then she would be in that house alone. So maybe not tonight.

“Nice,” Jackson says, a nod and a smile in approval, and then April’s wandering over and Alex suddenly has somewhere else to be for the next half hour.

The guy never turns up.

 

 

-

 

 

Alex’s door is shut and there are sounds she really doesn’t need to hear behind it when she gets home.

“I hope you’re planning to do laundry,” she says, handing him coffee five minutes after Sally the fourth floor nurse has scampered out her front door.

“Or you could sleep in your own bed for a week straight,” he counters, straight faced for only so long before he cracks a smile around the rim of his mug.

“Just don’t sleep with any more of our friends. Ever since you slept with April and she got attached, you don’t want to be within five feet of her. Which means every time she comes over to talk like, you know, a normal person, you wander off and sleep with a nurse or some random out-of-towner which, I got to say, is one hell of an inconsistent strategy. And it messes with the group equilibrium.”

He shrugs. “It’s not my fault she got attached. It was one night.”

“One night to a virgin.”

“Yeah, one night that did not include fumbling in the backseat of her parents’ car with some guy who hadn’t seen a pair of tits before.” So he’s posturing. That’s obvious. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point. “That’s better than either of us got.”

“Okay, well, I’m leaving the room now because this conversation is making me feel dirty and you are disturbed.”

“But right,” he calls after her.

She pretends she doesn’t hear him.

 

 

-

 

 

Sometimes she forgets where her keys are.

Sometimes she can’t remember where she parked her car or whether or not she bought orange juice last week.

These are not life-altering moments, letting her know that it’s all downhill from here. They are absent-minded ones. They may mean nothing and, conversely, they may mean everything.

Her thirty-fifth birthday is right around the corner and Alex tells her she can’t find her keys because he moved them last night, that’s all, and stop being so overdramatic.

 

 

-

 

 

 

“How are you?”

Derek speaks in low tones, despite the running of water and relative seclusion of the scrub room, no one coming in and out of those doors now. Forearm deep in soapy water, he’s got her cornered.

It’s too easy for her to disappear down hallways otherwise.

“I’m fine,” she says. His silence is telling of his doubt. “I’m fine, Derek.”

She turns off the faucet; so does he. Meets her movement for movement. And he keeps looking at her like if he stares hard enough, deep enough, she’ll open up and change her answer. He’s so convinced she’s not anything close to fine.

“That look you’re giving me right now,” the words are clipped, “that’s why we’re over. I know you’re concerned, believe me, I do, but I’m fine. I’m tired and I’m stressed but I do my job and so does everyone else. The only difference is my mother had Alzheimer’s and now everything I do gets shoved under a microscope on the off chance I have it too.”

In her periphery, she can see a nurse headed their way. It’s a convenient way to end things, her saving grace in blue scrubs.

“I’m fine,” she repeats, and then pushes through the doors.

 

 

-

 

 

Five days after their breakup, Derek locked himself in Alex’s bedroom – with Alex – and didn’t come out for half an hour.

“That had to be the longest non-medical related conversation you two have ever had.”

Alex kept looking at the ceiling. “It wasn’t.”

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

“But you’re fine around her,” Meredith motions between Alex and Lexie, as her sister slides in next to him, all the more confused for the strains of conversation that she’s managed to pick up.

“That’s because she doesn’t look at me like I ran down her dog and she’s only willing to forgive me because she’s decided I’m damaged.”

“What now?” Lexie asks, a hand held up in his direction, most likely to silence him.

The easiest explanation turns out to be the shortest one. “April.”

“Oh.” Then, her brows furrowing, “Still?”

Meredith shrugs. “He doesn’t do it with you.”

“I just said – ” he starts, in protest, and then lets it drop. Really, at this point Meredith’s toying with him, for lack of a better way to pass the time. “You want to do the gossipy thing? Why don’t you talk to her,” there is actual finger pointing here, “about how she’s been sleeping with Sloan for three months?”

Lexie’s attempt to stutter out a response fails rather spectacularly but it’s not hard to figure out that the only reason Alex isn’t dead yet is because there aren’t any available objects for her to stab him with. He goes on drinking his beer like absolutely nothing happened.

For her part, Meredith clamps her mouth shut and waits for the onslaught.

“How – what – how the hell do you know that?” Lexie finally settles on, shoving him hard in the shoulder. “I didn’t even tell anyone. He didn’t even tell anyone – he wouldn’t tell you right? He doesn’t even like you.”

“Relax,” Meredith says, reaching a hand across the table to cover Lexie’s, giving a squeeze of solidarity. “He has this uncanny ability to know these things. He’s done it to me.” Alex’s lazy smirk is completely unbefitting, considering the other half of that equation is six feet under in a cemetery. “And you could’ve told me.”

“It’s just that we’re taking things slow.” Alex gives a snort. Meredith fixes him with a look that promises pain. “I didn’t even know if there was anything to tell.”

She’s got soothing words and platitudes all ready to go but her ears pick up something before she can get started. An accent, foreign. Something clicks and her head turns.

“Alex,” she says, garnering his attention before she nods her head in the direction of the bar. Her mystery man is sitting right where he was the last time she saw him, chattering something to Joe. “That guy.”

He leans back, to get a better view, then, “Dead baby bike race guy?”

And there it is, like a magic word. Viper. He of the bad decision making and inappropriate kissing. It’s been more than a few years but he looks more or less the same. She just can’t believe that she didn’t see it before.

“Don’t get your hopes up, but I could kiss you right now.”

“I’ll try and contain myself.”

 

 

 

-

 

 

Viper sees her coming. Eyes lock on her slim frame before she’s even halfway to the bar. She’s distantly aware that his aren’t the only ones; it unnerves her far less than it should.

“I see you and Frat boy made up nice,” he observes, as she settles in next to him. Joe cocks a curious eyebrow in her direction and her small smile does its best to promise information the next time she goes on another of her tequila benders.

“So you know me?” She can place the nickname, in a vague sort of way. “You knew me. Last time.”

“There are a lot of painful memories tied to that pretty face of yours.” Her smile widens, in spite of herself. “A few pleasurable ones as well.”

“I’m sure.”

He leans in close, and for a second there she thinks he’s going to do the bold thing and kiss her. Her eyes do not flutter closed in preparation, which is a good thing since he turns his head at the last second, to whisper in her ear. It’s there that she realizes the misleading movement was deliberate, for show. It just wasn’t for her. “He’s watching you.”

Of course Alex is. He and Lexie are probably providing blow-by-blow commentary to an audience of no one but themselves. It’s something he can tease her about later, in order to keep the topic safely away from anything pertaining to him. “No,” she murmurs, “he’s watching you.”

It’s not the answer he was expecting and when she turns in she can catch the corners of his mouth turn up, a smirk that gives Alex’s a run for its money. “The man with the dark hair, by the dart board – he’s definitely watching you.”

He means Derek. “He’s always watching me.”

“You’re quite the hot commodity around these parts, aren’t you?”

“Apparently.” She catches Derek’s eye over Viper’s shoulder; he turns away. Meredith is a lot of things but she isn’t stupid; she knows what this does to him. She knows because there’s a lead pit in her stomach every time she sees him with another woman. But this is how it has to be and she can’t let past relationships keep her from smiling at men who flirt with her. Not when she wants to. So she doesn’t. “You should be flattered.”

“I am.”

“Good.”

 

 

-

 

 

“I didn’t remember him.”

“He was a patient. We see like a million of them.”

She levels her gaze. “But you did.”

Alex doesn’t have an answer for that. No one does.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
